Don't keep all your eggs in one basket. I'm sure you've heard that said. It couldn't be more true in online business. You can never depend on just ONE stream of income to float your ship but should diversify. This is why many millionaires have upwards of 10 different ways they earn money.
Tap and I are not millionaires by any means, but we are diversifying. Here's what our “eggs” looked like in Quarter 2, 2017 (and I do use affiliate links in this post *wink*).
April 2017 Income Streams
- 64% Classes/memberships/my own products
- 7.6% Coaching Clients
- 15.4% Misc. Services
- 11% Affiliate Commissions
- 2% Young Living
Amazon pays 30-60 days behind and we didn't have many sales at the beginning of the year, and not much ad traffic, so no Amazon payout this month.
May 2017 Income Streams
- 21.6% Classes/memberships/my own products
- 37% Coaching Clients
- 18.6% email advertising
- 10.1% Ad networks (Amazon and Adsense)
- 5.6% Services
- 1.5% Affiliate Commissions
- 4% Amazon (my books on Amazon)
- 2% Amazon (my books on Kindle)
This month we participated as an author in the Build Your Bundle Homeschool Sale. Fabulous opportunity for curriculum creators and affiliates alike. Earnings would be paid late June.
June 2017 Income Streams
- 49.8% Affiliate Commissions
- 26.7% Coaching Clients
- 11.8% Classes/memberships/my own products
- 9.5% email advertising
- 0.7% Ad networks (Amazon and Adsense)
- 0.7% Amazon (my books on Amazon)
- 0.5% Young Living
- 0.3% Amazon (my books on Kindle)
The 9 income streams in Q2:
Here is a visual of our total second quarter earnings broken down into 9 income streams:
Here is a visual of our total first 6 months earnings broken down into 10 total income streams. You can see that overall Affiliate Commissions, Coaching and my own Products/membership site are consistently the largest streams.
Second Quarter My Products/Services Income Sources:
- Private Coaching packages
- The Blog Connection
- Emails that Convert
- Affiliate Marketing Secrets & Strategies
- 10 Days to an Organized Homeschool
- Media Kit Services
- Live Virtual Masterclasses
Second Quarter Affiliate Income Sources:
- Amazon
- Copywriting Academy
- Educents
- Best Year Ever
- The Simple Pin Master Course
- Tailwind Course
- Diffusing Mamas – Essential Oil Diffuser Jewelry
- Young Living – natural home products & essential oils
- Ultimate Bundles
- Build Your Bundle Homeschool Sale
Second Quarter 2017 Expenses
Another thing to understand when you begin to blog for profit, is that a blogger is self-employed. No one is paying your benefits or setting taxes aside before you get your checks. You are responsible for your own income reporting, income taxes, state sales taxes, health care, insurances, etc. You have to take all of this into consideration when calculating your total profit from blogging.
You'll also have any number of business expenses, like these:
- Web Hosting
- Bluehost – great for first-time bloggers
- Siteground
- Domain Registration (purchase and renewal)
- I use GoDaddy for this and love them. I always recommend you DO NOT buy your domain and your web hosting from the same people.
- Email (I recommend using one of these, never send a mass mailing from your gmail account)
- ConvertKit – my favorite. A very robust software.
- Mailerlite
- Aweber
- Mailchimp
- Landing Page Software
- Advertising Expenses
- Office Supplies and printing (business cards, media kits, customer thank you's)
- Postage
- Stock Images
- Apps/subscriptions
- Subcontractors (project management, web design, tax services)
- Podcast Expenses
- hosting
- editing
- transcription
Professional Development – I am a firm believer in continuing to learn and invest in yourself and your own education. In the second quarter I learned from these events courses and books:
Conferences for networking and professional development (see our list here)
- Worldschooling Summit, Merida, Mexico (Apr, speaker)
- Homeschool Conf. Jiutepec, Mexico (Jun, speaker)
Courses:
- The Pivot Course by Mike Kim
- Travel Sponsorship Mini-course by Georg Papp
- The Financial Reboot Course by Tracie Fobes
Business Books:
- The Freedom Journal by John Lee Dumas
- Business Boutique by Christy Wright
- Real Artists Don't Starve by Jeff Goins
- Future Marketing by Jon Wuebben
- Living Forward by Michael Hyatt
- Interview Connections by Jessica Rhodes
- Podcast Launch by John Lee Dumas
- Podcast Guest Profits by Tom Schwab
Other Books:
- Forgiving Others, Forgiving Me by Renee Fisher
- Life Giver by Lara Williams
- UnDaunted: Daring to Do What God Calls You to Do by Christine Caine
Masterminds I participated in:
- The Blog Connection
- Positive Progress Mastermind
- Abundant Mastermind
- Memberships Mastermind
Evaluation:
As for next quarter… We've cut out some apps and subscriptions that had not proved to help our bottom line, and we've evaluated where we're spending our time. We're also going to be offering a couple new services: WordPress Maintenance and Twitter Management.
In Quarter 3, we're working to get my book ready for release in Quarter 4, we'll have another Open Cart for The Blog Connection and we'll focus a bit more of our efforts on teaching and gaining visibility in new crowds, including our Blogging Successfully Retreat September 30th.
The podcast, we've realized, is also taking more from the bottom line that it's giving. We plan to revisit that strategy in Quarter 4 and find creative ways to make it earn more in Season 2.
I love that online business is so fluid, and versatile and that it's always changing. It keeps me learning and keeps me on my toes.
